The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the communicative competence formation during the Russian classes as a non-native (as a foreign language). Communicative competence, the components of which include linguistic, socio-cultural, sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects, is considered as a component of the future professional activity of cadets of higher military educational institutions. The emphasis is placed on the merely linguistic component of the communicative competence at the initial stage of teaching the Russian language. As an instance, we have chosen a system of exercises for the lesson, where students are introduced to various ways of expressing agreement disagreement in the Russian language